cave paintings

Cave paintings are sometimes seen as evidence of early religion. So-called ‘nomadic’ peoples hunted, fished and gathered berries or fruit in season [depending where they were located in the world]. We do know from anthropological studies of indigenous American peoples that power-control [as defined my the late Mary Black Rogers] was ascribed to all living and non-living things. Thus hunting was not a matter of technical skill, but of degree of power-control of the hunter vis a vis the hunted. From this it seems reasonable to extrapolate the possibility that cave paintings of animals were connected somehow to having a successful hunt.

In one set of paintings at Pech Merle in the Pyrenees region of France, images of spotted horses intrigue scholars. Recently DNA testing has shown that spotted horses indeed did live in this era and that the paintings were of real animals and not imagined animals.